Pete's QBASIC Site

Re: Columns in QB - Release

2023-08-16T11:06:56-05:00

The Autumn Springs Columns clone was one of the reasons I wanted to write my own. It has a sweet audio engine and looks good but some choices are baffling to me. It uses a high-resolution SVGA graphic mode so they could have square pixels but they also made every pixel 4x their size (I mean, if you're going to use a non-standard graphic mode anyway, go for 320x240 instead,) it also flickers way too much and is unresponsive at times. Too bad. I got 7 other Columns clones in my collection, I attached a sample and a list of the games I have sorted so far.

How's your Halloween maze game going by the way?

EDIT: added Doomed, by Rodrigo Rocha Gomes e Souza

DOOMED.ZIP

list.zip

CCLONES.RAR

Statistics: Posted by MikeHawk — Wed Aug 16, 2023 11:06 am

Re: Columns in QB - Release

2023-07-19T23:52:17-05:00

Hey Mike,

I stumbled across this old remake of Columns in QB from 2001. It's not bad. Yours definitely seems to play better but it's interesting to see different people's take on the same source material.

Here's a link if you haven't stumbled upon it yet: http://www.phatcode.net/downloads.php?id=117

Statistics: Posted by Erik — Wed Jul 19, 2023 11:52 pm

Re: Columns in QB - Release

2022-09-10T04:03:33-05:00

Very nice!

Statistics: Posted by Anthony.R.Brown — Sat Sep 10, 2022 4:03 am

Re: Columns in QB - Release

2022-09-06T07:50:13-05:00

Awesome work!

Also, I checked out your QB website. What a blast from the past! I love seeing a throwback style of website in this day and age.

Statistics: Posted by Pete — Tue Sep 06, 2022 7:50 am

Re: Columns in QB - Release

2022-04-25T14:32:16-05:00

Thanks!
Yes, the short delay before the column is placed was in the original game. I got some things close enough (holding the down arrow key increases the score like it does on the Genesis, but there's a one point difference because I didn't pay attention to the delay before cementing the column,) and others not so much (I learned later that diagonals are supposed to give more points than vertical or horizontal streaks.) The speed is also not the same. It seems there's a different set of rules and scoring according to the game mode, it's all very confusing.

Statistics: Posted by MikeHawk — Mon Apr 25, 2022 2:32 pm

Re: Columns in QB - Release

2022-04-11T12:27:26-05:00

Wow! This is some incredible work. That looks and plays fantastic! It's been many years since I last played Columns so I don't know if it's in the original but I did like the grace period when the column lands where you can quickly still switch the jewels around or slide it to the side. It was especially helpful once the speed really gets going.

I used the in-game screenshot function to capture my game over high score: 81,910 @ lvl 14 starting with Novice Level 0. (I had to convert it to png because this forum doesn't seem to like bmp attachments)

Statistics: Posted by Erik — Mon Apr 11, 2022 12:27 pm

Columns in QB - Release

2022-03-17T07:03:08-05:00

It's a clone of Sega's 1990 Columns in QuickBASIC. It has both the "original" and "flash" game modes, and supports joystick. It also features all the blocks from the Game Gear version. It's been tested under DOSBox (around 1500 cycles) and on a 18 years old laptop (Intel Celeron M 1.50Ghz running Windows XP SP3, so that's also DOS emulation) and works fine. It only uses PC Speakers for sound/music (S to switch or turn off) because I'm dead certain my previous programs couldn't run on genuine hardware due to my crappy SoundBlaster code.

It should work.
Fingers crossed.
(All sources included as usual.)

COLUMNS.ZIP

Statistics: Posted by MikeHawk — Thu Mar 17, 2022 7:03 am